Netflix's Thumb-Based Ratings System Is The Epitome Of Uselessness

This weekend, I thought that I would give GLOW a shot on Netflix, as the Alison Brie wrestling dramedy seemed right up my alley for reasons having to do with both wrestling and Alison Brie. I was curious to see how the show was being received so far, but naturally when I looked for the Netflix rating, there were no stars to be found.

That’s when I remembered Netflix has deemed it wise to replace its stars with what is quite literally the most useless rating system I have ever seen across any form of media.

It’s been like this for a while now, but it has not gotten any better. There is no adjustment period that makes this thing good. It’s terrible, and needs to be killed and replaced as soon as humanly possible.

Netflix has replaced its stars with a thumbs up and down based rating system that gives you a percent “match” based on what it thinks you’ll like or don’t like. The chief problem, among many, is that there’s no sense of scale to the thing, nor does it make it even clear at a base level what say, a 75% “match” even means. Does that mean 75% of people with my taste in content like it? Does that mean three quarters of the time I’ll like it with a 25% chance I hate it? Does that mean I would rate the show as a C+ given my interests? I’ve no idea.

I'm sorry but no

Netflix

The only way you can even trying to figure out the smoke signals Netflix is sending you through this rating system is to thumbs up or thumbs down titles with zero shades of gray and see what shows up. Think Bloodline was pretty okay? Thumbs up. Think Breaking Bad is the best show ever made? Thumbs up. Same thing. And there isn’t even a neutral “that was OK;” it’s thumbs up, thumbs down only.

While this is how Rotten Tomatoes scores reviews, a binary fresh or rotten at the 6/10 threshold, it’s also an aggregate of dozens, hundreds of critics. This is just you, and therefore bound to be more inaccurate in estimating quality and not reflective of the possible nuances of your opinions (even Rotten Tomatoes lets you see individual scores on reviews). Thumbs up and thumbs down is also how YouTube rates its videos, but even there, the metric is much more useful because you can see the ratio. You might be watching a pretty good video if it has 2,000 likes and 13 dislikes, or you’re probably watching a worse one with 1,800 likes and 754 dislikes. But Netflix is lacking even that kind of distinction with its “match” system.

Netflix’s stars were always skewed toward what it thought were your own preferences, whether you knew it or not, but it was at least a somewhat reliable indicator of what you were about to watch was pretty good or absolutely terrible. Now, any sense of the quality of a show or movie is gone. Currently, Meet the Blacks is the best “match” horror movie in Netfiix’s horror list at 80% when it looks precisely like a film that would have shown up with 1.5 out of 5 stars before. The Invitation, a horror movie I have seen but have not rated on Netflix, is a dismal 63% match about two dozen movies down the list, and I thought it was rather brilliant. I may think I want to watch Netflix’s War Machine with a 98% match, but sitting right next to it somehow is the Dreamworks Trolls movie with 97%, which makes me much more skeptical.

But why

Netflix

The system is totally nonsensical and entirely unhelpful. Scrolling up to “acclaimed” TV shows, 30 Rock has a nearly perfect 98% score, which is acceptable, yet Friday Night Lights, one of my favorite shows of all time by a wide margin, has a 78% score. If I didn’t know better, this implies to me either this show isn’t a good match for me relative to all these 95%+ picks (which includes shows I hate like Glee and American Crime) or that at best, it’s a 3.5/5 TV program, if I’m translating this cryptograph into an actual rating. It’s a total mess.

As for what Netflix should do? Reverting back to the old star system would be a start. There are pros and cons of pulling from external sites like Rotten Tomatoes (which is not good at scoring TV and is owned by Fandago, a movie ticket-selling company) and IMDB (which is owned by Amazon, which runs a rival streaming service). But right now there is quite literally nothing that indicates the level of quality of any shows or movies on Netflix. It’s some screwy system based on what an algorithm thinks you’ll like, but even if you’re feeding it binary thumbs up and thumbs down, it still is probably getting very little right. You can say I'm not putting enough effort into making the recommendation system better by rating more stuff, but I just want to have some general sense of quality of these offerings before I try them, I don't need to know how similar they are to other stuff I like from a genre/actor/format perspective. Netflix doesn't seem to understand that distinction.

There is no fast way to quality check content on Netflix at this point. Not that it was great under the star system, but it’s flat-out pointless now, and I’ve taken to literally just Googling the names of shows and movies I don’t recognize to find out if they’re any good, which is not exactly the user experience Netflix should be going for. There are too many good shows out there for me to waste my time figuring out if something is terrible or not.

There’s a fine line between balancing recommended, personalized content, making sure all the shows and movies they’re paying for actually get watched, and the user experience of guiding people toward actually good stuff. This current rating system seems to be dropping the ball in most of those areas, and the sooner it’s replaced with a more coherent system, the better it will be for all parties.